Kitchen Dining and more

UX / UI

Kitchen dining and more is an online destination for handpicked designer ware for Kitchen and Dining.
Their products are sourced from around the world with the vision to make every kitchen and dinner table look beautiful, elegant and exotic.

To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this project

My Role

I was involved in Kitchen dining and more from initial phases. I have designed an e-commerce website and also an IOS app.

The whole design is focused on women who wants to have a beautiful affordable living space, unlike traditional stores KD&m gives them a choice to choose between items that are collected from various countries for an affordable price.

Problem

Design a desktop e-commerce for all those people mainly ladies who want to have a beautiful living and kitchen spaces, website must look elegant, trustworthy, products should promise a great quality.

It is also important to make them navigate between different sections easily.

Challenges

Creating an intuitive and quick checkout flow
Give customers different suggestions to create beautiful homes.
Create the ability for guest logins
Give a world class shopping experience
Provide an experience similar to in-store service

Solution

I designed a site that allows users to know latest trends and shop them in the home page, it is also easy to navigate to a page with their choices. see what is in their list, and quickly proceed through the checkout process. Turning what can be a highly stressful task into a process that is simple and quick.

Research Process

Understanding Business

I placed KD&m within a marketplace business model, but with aspects of community that they would like to convey. I then decided on the success metrics I would like to work towards.

Success metrics

Returning customers
Avoiding cart abandonment
Direct purchase

Competitor Analysis

The competitor analysis involved both shome and fashion e-commerce sites. This helped with realising what industry standards to include in the site. I also decided to analyse online companies with strong customer service and a great checkout system as this is what True Spirit wanted to convey as well.

e-commerce competitors: Surla table, Ikka dukka, Tadpole

Non-direct competitor checkout flows: Amazon and flipkart

Discoveries

Great service for customers includes easy returns, ease of contact when problems arise, and informative FAQ sections
Information regarding things should be in detail and stock availability should be clear
Pickup locations are not offered widely
PayPal is not offered as an option on a lot of sites
Should be modern looking or appealing sites dedicated solely to home.

I worked with founders to organize the products into easy to locate categories and subcategories and also used my competitor research to inform my site navigation structure.

I then used card sorting results to create a hierarchical sitemap which would provide an intuitive way for users to navigate between pages.

Problems to solve

Understanding how people categorise kitchen and home ware
Understanding what pieces of data should be top level information
Creating labels for users ease of understanding

Personas

As part of the project we were supplied with personas. I collated a quick list of each of the personas goals and then using the “5 why’s technique” I distilled these goals into an overarching theme for each persona.

Veda wants quick and easy - knows what she wants and wants minimum hassle.

Sneha wants personable and good service similar to in-store experience - confidence in the product and site.

Both want ease of returns and want to have enough information so that they know they are buying the right thing.

User Flows

Persona Userflow

From finding separate overarching goals for Veda and sneha it was a lot easier to design the buying journey for each user. Veda only needed a quick process while Sneha required more guidance with the uniform choice and care. Breaking down each task into actions and the thought process behind each action also helped with determining the “happy path” of users.

Checkout Userflow

After analysing competitor checkout flows I knew I wanted to keep mine as simple as possible, but still with the options that users expect if they are purchasing in-store. An example of this is deciding to change quantity of an item while at the checkout in-store which would translate to being able to edit an item in an e-commerce checkout.

Rough Sketching

Starting with some low-fidelity sketches I worked through three iterations of how I thought these features should be placed in the checkout process. I then let my clients look over the sketched flows and iterated on the feedback I was given.

Wireframing

I was then ready to create the newly iterated checkout sketches as digital wireframes in Omnigraffle.

Outcome

Two of the most challenging aspects of this project were how to let users keep track of trending items and to create a checkout flow that would not result in cart abandonment. Through the process I was trying to provide information for each item with out navigating to another page and to add cart quickly before they loose track of it.Through usability testing and research I was able to implement a checkout flow that both registered users and guests could easily navigate through. An easy solution to the tracking of essential items was also found through usability testing. This outside perspective not only helped find an elegant solution but taught me a valuable lesson in not believing my ideas will always work.

Website

Home Screen

We were providing different layouts for users to know how to setup different themes and also providing an option with which they can quickly add items they like from that theme, before adding users can go through specifications of product with out jumping to a new site. We were trying to let users know how many people liked and how much stock is till left.